The nation's second-largest wireless carrier, AT&T, has raised its smartphone sales target for 2012. It smartphone goals have been increased thanks to strong demand during Q4 and the holiday shopping season.

AT&T has now increased its sales target modestly to 26 million units. AT&T notes that it sold 6.4 million smartphones in the first two months of Q4 2012.

"Traffic in stores has been strong," said CEO Ralph de la Vega. De la Vega also told attendees at the UBS media and communications conference that sales of Nokia Lumia smartphones were doing "very well."

De la Vega did note that 5 million customers have purchased AT&T's data share plans in less than four months. He also says that 25% of the customers buying the data share plans had purchased data allowances of 10 GB or higher, which is a boon for AT&T’s bottom line. The wireless carrier hadn't predicted such a high percentage of customers would purchase data allotments of 10 GB or more.

AT&T recently scored dead last in Consumer Reports' customer satisfaction survey. AT&T did score very well for its 4G LTE network.

1MB/second is ~2.5 TB/month; the most recent numbers I've seen for average smartphone data use are 600MB/month. That puts a single 1MB/sec torrenter as creating a larger load than 4000 typical customers; and depending on connection quality data consumption could be several times higher. US suburban population density is ~2000-2500/square mile (first # 1990 value, second is from scaling it by population growth since then). Only a handful people abusing unlimited connections would be able to completely swamp a tower.

Coming at it from a different direction, a cell tower has roughly the same amount of spectrum available (per service level) as a wifi access point. Unless they're placed as densely as wifi they can't provide anywhere near the same amount of service; population density numbers indicate the current spread in deployment densities is on the order of 1000:1.